Upside Down Under

By Marvin Baker, a new weekly column in The Kenmare News

Is it an election or a circus?

Posted 8/09/16 (Tue)

As a news reporter, I should be getting excited about the upcoming election in November.

Instead, I’m completely disgusted with all the shenanigans, intrigued at the same time because nobody in this day and age has witnessed anything like this in a presidential election and, people keep talking about wrong conclusions.

We have two major candidates for president, neither of whom are well liked, both who are playing Americans for fools with one of them, Hillary Clinton, getting away with a myriad of illegal activity in the past five years.

The other, Donald Trump, a business man who has no political experience, has time and time again shown the American people that he isn’t prepared to be president, yet people continue to support him, encouraging anger, mockery and cheap shots at just about anybody, including his own party.

Last weekend he really crossed the line with his mocking of a Gold Star Mother whose son, an Army captain, was killed in Iraq.

To make it even more interesting, he blamed President Obama for the captain’s death in 2004, four years before Obama took office.

Clinton is no saint either. Just check out some of the things on her dossier.

• Recently cleared of any wrongdoing after an FBI probe indicated she did nothing illegal, but was extremely careless with her private email server.

• Benghazi: Clinton and others in the Obama Administration lied to the American public about that attack.

• Former President Bill Clinton meets with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a day later his wife Hillary is cleared.

So, the FBI doesn’t consider compromising national security illegal? The announcement to clear her name has got to be the dumbest thing the FBI has ever done.

I looked up the word treason to get the textbook definition. It simply states it’s betrayal of one’s country.

That happened in Benghazi when Clinton lied to the American public about the cause of that Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy that left four Americans dead including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

How’s that for starters? Then came the Democratic National Convention in which chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was kicked out for rigging the primaries to support Clinton over Bernie Sanders and Clinton herself blamed it all on a Russian computer hack while Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange said Russia wasn’t responsible.

Has the United States really come down to this? We shouldn’t have to choose between a crook and a con man and then have to deal with this sort of behavior the next four years.

And to take it a step further, as many as 13 million voters continue to support Bernie Sanders as the top Democrat, a far better individual than Clinton.

There’s still an alternative. Libertarian Gary Johnson is a former New Mexico governor who is modern, well liked and was a fiscal hawk for New Mexico. He is running for president and his name is on the ballot in all 50 states.

For all intents and purposes there’s no doubt this guy is the most stable of the three, seems sincere and has North Dakota ties.

After Trump’s latest blunder that the British would call “over the top,” senior Republicans need to intervene soon or duct tape Trump’s mouth shut because belittling a Gold Star Mother is going to get him crushed in the general election.

There are a lot of good Republicans, Trump isn’t one of them. There are a lot of good Democrats, Clinton isn’t one of them. Just how in the world did they get to be our nominees?

It’s time to set aside party loyalty and vote for a stable individual. I’d vote for Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, but not Trump. I’d vote for Bernie Sanders, Charlie Crist or Brian Schweitzer, but not Clinton.

When we have voters pleading symbolically to have Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau run for president, something is seriously wrong with our political system.

Remember Watergate and Nixon resigning? That pales in comparison to what we have now.

Go back through more than 240 years of the United States and you’ll find Warren Harding, Ulysses Grant, Herbert Hoover and James Garfield at the bottom of the presidential rankings list.

OK! That’s four in 240 years. Now, we have two at the same time in one year. If something isn’t done soon to rectify this mess, we’re going to be in for a rough ride.